Dropping a dime on doctors

(For those of you unfamiliar with U.S. slang, to "drop a dime" means to report someone for bad behavior, i.e. report them to the police. For many years U.S. pay phones cost a dime.)

This is a question mainly intended for those who are members of under-one-roof style HMOs, like Kaiser Permanente just to give a completely random example... In this type of organization the doctors are paid a straight salary and are, theoretically, accountable to the larger organization as that organization is their employer.

Have you ever lodged a complaint with an HMO against a doctor or other medical person in their employ because of inappropriate treatment for CFS (or lack of treatment)? Say, for example, you are refused treatment by a doctor because they don't believe CFS is a real illness, or because they don't believe there are any treatments available, or because they just don't want to be bothered with you and your weird illness. I would be very interested to know if anyone has done this and if so, what were the results.

(For those of you unfamiliar with U.S. slang, to "drop a dime" means to report someone for bad behavior, i.e. report them to the police. For many years U.S. pay phones cost a dime.)

This is a question mainly intended for those who are members of under-one-roof style HMOs, like Kaiser Permanente just to give a completely random example... In this type of organization the doctors are paid a straight salary and are, theoretically, accountable to the larger organization as that organization is their employer.

Have you ever lodged a complaint with an HMO against a doctor or other medical person in their employ because of inappropriate treatment for CFS (or lack of treatment)? Say, for example, you are refused treatment by a doctor because they don't believe CFS is a real illness, or because they don't believe there are any treatments available, or because they just don't want to be bothered with you and your weird illness. I would be very interested to know if anyone has done this and if so, what were the results.

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If you reported anything to the HMO, they would probably call the Doctor and congratulate him/her for a job well done.

I would think you would be better off reporting a doctor to a state licensing board and organizations that monitor health practioners. Maybe even try to track down smarmy attorneys who might consider suing for failure to treat.

Medical organizations, doctors, and insurance companies are judged by the community standard of care when it comes to legal issues. Since the "standard" of care for ME/CFS is very different from what is on this forum or in the research journals, it would be hard to sue a doc or org for their care in this regard. Also check your contract with your insurance, a lot of times there are some prohibitions about suing as to get the insurance, you might have signed an arbitration agreement.

Not agreeing or disagreeing with you but just telling you what you might come up against.

I'm not talking about legal action, sorry if my original post was unclear. I'm talking about lodging a complaint with member services/ombudsman office type of thing, on the basis of having been given poor advice, treated with condescension, things like that. Say for example a doctor telling you that CFS does not exist, and that you need to be treated for a psychiatric condition, and telling you have some other condition based on a lab result that in fact shows no such thing, and assuring you that you'll get better very quickly if you take antidepressants. These are strictly hypothetical examples, of course.

Not looking for recompense, and it would be a very very small thing to do in relation to the scope of the poor treatment all of us usually get from doctors, but I can't help feeling that raising at least a little stink for the most egregious stuff might be a tiny step toward helping curb this kind of behavior, at least among salaried doctors who work for an organization that is supposed to be collecting data on patient satisfaction and quality of care and addressing complaints from patients.

Heck, I very often get evaluation forms from my HMO after seeing a new doctor; in the past I've always ignored them as being just one more thing I didn't want to cope with. Now I really wish I hadn't.

I understand your feeling of frustration and wanting to do something (anything) to be heard.
The problem is that with ME/CFS, the medical establishment hasn't come up with one protocol to follow that has been proven to work.
There is also a lack of a specific marker to establish a definitive diagnosis of ME/CFS.

I have the same rage toward my original doctor who when I first came down with the illness said: " I'm going to give you anti-depressants because i think you are in major depression or you might have CFS but it doesn't matter because we would treat you the same way - with anti-depressants."

At the time, I was very ignorant and just followed what my MD said and allowed my disease to spiral downward in a scary way.
I feel that there's nothing I can do about it now because my doctor was acting in ignorance not maliciousness.

The key is to try to educate these primary practitioners as much as possible.